


A Witch By Any Other Name

by savanting



Category: Mulan (2020)
Genre: Ficlet, One Shot, Origin Story, Pre-Canon, Short One Shot, Witches Doing Things, Xian Lang Deserved Better, Xian Lang is a BAMF, villain origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:54:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26296738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savanting/pseuds/savanting
Summary: Xian Lang knows human suffering even if she has left that emotion behind her (or tried to). One-Shot.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	A Witch By Any Other Name

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own any Disney properties, such as _Mulan_ (2020). Xian Lang had SO MUCH lost potential as a character. This is just a ficlet, but I expect to write more about her in the future (once I've processed the film a bit more).

_Xian Lang_ — it was not the name she had been born with, but it was one she had chosen. There was a difference, she had learned long ago. Names had power, especially with her kind whose bodies overflowed with _qi_ , and she wielded them as just another extension of the magic that had assailed her since she was a child.

The name she had once been called – she had forgotten it long ago.

As Xian Lang shifted deftly between the form of a bird and a woman, she scoured over the mainland she had once called home. Her wings bore the tide of the winds; her feet brushed the dirt of the ground. Either form was fine for her, each easy to live in and breathe in, but she went undetected so much easier as a bird than a woman. As a woman – well, men had few things on their minds other than taming her, conquering her, or killing her.

She would have none of that.

When she tired of feathers and wings, her body scattered and then reformed into her human form. Since she found herself in a city, she used a glamour on her features to appear as a fine woman, a lady of standing, well-dressed and accentuated and not the least bit out of the ordinary here. A man passed by on the street and barely spared her a glance. She smiled under the glamour: it was so easy to fool the common man.

But as she walked the city, men and women retreating into buildings of stone and thatch as rain began to fall in pebbles and drops, she grew cold and hungry. It might have been easier to shift into a bird then and take to a hunt, but she did not like rain upon her feathers. Human form offered a warmth that avian living somehow lacked.

She found a hostel in the city and watched with amusement as the man in the front entrance raised his eyebrows at her. It was rare in this land for women to walk boldly without men; usually, she abided by such norms for appearance’s sake, but tonight she was tired. Instead of tricking the man with simple magical persuasion, however, Xian Lang offered a simpering smile that she knew would be demure and docile to the man. _Let me lie for you,_ she thought, _so you can give me what I want._

Thankfully, he did not ask any questions about her solitude in the city. She also did not need to demean herself by rutting with the man – there were times when she debased herself for such urges from men who had something she needed – but his eyes did linger on her as he led her to a room. She paid him in coins that would turn into stones by the time she was far from the city limits. When he bid her good night, however, and she was left in a room with only a small lantern of light and a bedroll, she regretted that she had not invited him into the room: his warmth would have only added to her own.

But Xian Lang, when she lay down to settle in for the night out of the rain, did not sleep the way a normal woman might have. She had lived too long as a bird throughout her life to know truly how to rest in ease. She was fitful, tossing and turning, or lying awake with her ears trained for any hint of noise. Her only companion was the patter of rain against the roof.

When she did fall into some semblance of sleep, images and their sensations flashed behind her eyelids: the remembrance of screams when she had first torn through her flesh into the form of a bird, the tears that had fallen from her mother’s face when Xian Lang had been captured and pressed down onto a boulder, the glint and sheen of the sword that had nearly taken her head before she had grappled away and taken flight as a fugitive away from the village she had once known…

That was so very long ago, but her eyes were wet when she awoke.

Xian Lang slipped out of the hostel before first light, passing by a sleeping man armed only with a broom. She took one long look at the city streets, glossy with the aftermath of the rainstorm, before she shed her glamour and once more took flight.

She didn’t know how long she flew, or even how long she stayed in the form of a bird. Time mattered little when she was a bird, as the very notion of it was a manmade invention. All that mattered was that the sun shifted, the moon took its place, and she was able to fill her belly in some way. It was a long while before she stepped foot in a city.

When she next took human form, she stood on the outskirts of a rural village. Smoke burned her nostrils as she took in the sight of smoldering huts and destroyed crops. The smell of burnt flesh was yet another reminder of another manmade invention: war.

As she stepped through the remains of the village, she had no need of a glamour or its uses. There were no survivors to behold her, no one to scare with her shifts between animal and human. All she knew was that men – those vile creatures, the ones who had made her hide herself for so long and so often – had done this. They would continue to do this. Their pursuit of domination would know no end until the world burned beneath their feet.

She had been a little girl, so scared of the power flowing through her veins, yet their first instinct had been to kill her as if she were an enemy to be thwarted and snuffed out. The blade had been so close that she had heard the hiss of it against her skin.

Against the charred bones of one hut, Xian Lang found a small doll, the plaything of a child, but the child was no longer of this world. Her hands shook around the doll, her talons digging into its cloth exterior.

Anything she could do to obliterate the word _war_ from the human consciousness – she would do it.

Even if she had to embrace the name of _witch_ in the process.


End file.
